ADDITIONAL NOTES. vii
Pp. 26,1. 5; 27,1. i. The Aethiopians
It is possible that Homer had some vague inkling of the
Sudanese, who are the swarthiest of all negroes. But instead of
locating the Aethiopians definitely in the far south, he vaguely
relegated them (in the Iliad) to the borders of Ocean, i.e. to those
regions beyond the known world where imaginative authors of all
ages have placed their idealised societies of 'noble savages.' In
the Odyssey Homer partitioned the Ethiopians into a far western
and a far eastern section. This new location of their abodes was
not the product of fresh information about the habitats of the
dark-skinned tribes, but an inference from Homer's belief that the
earth was a flat disc, and that the sun at dawn and dusk grazed
its rim, so that the adjacent peoples were scorched to blackness.
Pp. 29, 30. The Pygmies
Hecataeus added the detail that in order to drive off the
cranes the Pygmies dressed up in rams' fleeces and horns, and
agitated rattles, (Jacoby, Die Fragments der griechischen Historiker^
vol. i, fr. 328.)
PP- 3I-33- Amber
The earliest amber to reach the Mediterranean was brought by
the sea-route from Heligoland. About 1600 B.C. Baltic amber
.began to come down to the Adriatic and passed on to Peloponnesus
by way of Pylos. A land route by which Jutish amber reached
Italy was also established, but this went by way of the German
rivers and the valley of the Inn rather than through Gaul. There is
no evidence that amber ever travelled with tin across Gaul. On
the early amber trade see V. G. Childe, op. #'/., pp. 136, 137;
J. M. de Navarro, Geographical Journal, 1925, pp. 481-507.
P. 32,1.14. The Hyperboreans
The Hyperboreans were usually imagined by Greek writers from
the time of Hesiod as an idealised society under the special
protection of Apollo—a northern counterpart to the 'blameless
Aethiopians' of Homer. Their homes were placed anywhere in
the north beyond the borders of the known world. But Herodotus'
Hyperboreans were clearly a real people with a definable abode.
According to an ingenious theory of C. T. Seltman, Classical